Oka Conservatism, Out of Touchness And The Real Middle

By Iain Martin

Ed Miliband is attempting to woo what he terms the “squeezed middle”, a term that somehow baffled and annoyed John Humphrys when he interviewed the Labour leader on the Today programme on Friday. The presenter could not believe that the group of voters Miliband is talking about earn a little above or a little underneath £26,000.

Writes Cohen:

“The Institute of Fiscal Studies might have told Humprhys that this was indeed the band in the middle of British society, and that only the richest 15 per cent or so of people pay the 40 percent tax rate. When I last spoke to the IFS, it told me that it makes as much sense to look household income as individual salaries. By this measure, families bringing in £30-£50,000 a year make up the broad middle class, which fills so much of Britain. Exactly the people Miliband was talking about, in other words.

The financial crisis is hammering them. Their services are being cut – and they cannot afford to go private. Their taxes are about to go up, their benefits are about to be withdrawn and ministers are about to tell their children they must take on vast debts if they want to go to university.

Humphrys did not seem to know it. Miliband’s definition of the middle class exasperated him. “It’s about as vague as it gets” he cried. “The squeezed middle is what? I don’t know… I’ve no idea what you mean.”

I thought Miliband made perfect sense, but Humphrys illustrated the problem that Labour faces now and the Coalition faced when it announced the abolition of child benefits for higher rate taxpayers. Star journalists – the presenters, columnists, editors and political correspondents, who set the agenda – are rich men and women.”

(Cohen speculates that Humphrys earns six or seven times the £26,000 mark.)

“I don’t want to sneer at Humprhys, the way he sneered at Miliband. He is a fine broadcaster, who deserves every penny he earns. I only want to say that journalists will never understand Middle England until they realize that it is nowhere near as affluent and nowhere near as secure as they imagine, and that is about to become a bleaker and more frightened place.”

Absolutely. Hammer, nail, hit right on the head. As some of us have observed for a while, this area is the coalition’s great strategic and electoral weakness.

In the autumn, a baffled cabinet minister took me to one side. Didn’t critics of the removal of child benefit from higher rate taxpayers understand that it would only be the “rich” who were effected? As I wrote at the time, I made two observations.

First, if he thought that someone is rich when they earn £44,000 and live in Milton Keynes, or Watford, or Kent, or in the West Midlands, who then pays for an expensive commute (about to become more expensive) and who probably has a sizeable mortgage just to get into a half-decent area in which the schools will be acceptable enough if he or she has children, then I suggested he and his colleagues had rather lost touch with reality. Those voters are not rich. Indeed, remove £1500 in child benefit from such a taxpayer’s partner and you’ve taken away the equivalent of the spend on the annual family holiday.

Second, a lesson that Blair learned from Thatcher is that tax is not just about those who pay a particular rate at a given time. It is about the aspirational who have a reasonable expectation that if they work hard, and do the right thing, then maybe a few years down the line they’ll be fortunate enough to be near or in the higher tax bracket. A couple in which one half earns between £25,000 and £30,000 and the other £10,000 is in that zone.

Someone astute from Blair’s old Number 10 team who I ran into the other day was impressed with Cameron’s day to day grasp of the basics of being PM, but he thought the child benefit row a harbinger: “I don’t get it. They were attacking swing voters. It smells of complacency.”

Several sharp pieces have appeared in recent weeks raising doubts about how in touch with “middle Britain” the coalition’s high-ups are. Martin Ivens in the Sunday Times noted what he termed a Cameroon culture of entitlement, and the previously supportive Sandra Parsons was brutal in the Daily Mail. The appointment of a personal photographer for the PM, and other aides to burnish his image, had particularly annoyed her.

“I’m afraid I can no longer ignore my discomfort at the pampered exclusivity that surrounds his Notting Hill set. There is the worrying sense that too many decisions affecting all of us are being made around dinner tables in ­stylish West London kitchens, fashionably appointed with reclaimed oak floorboards, opaque glass splashbacks and stainless-steel worktops… The trouble with Cameron and his ­cronies is that too many of them are too disconnected from how real people live. Their idea of cutting back is to shop at Sainsbury’s instead of Waitrose, order fewer clothes for the kids from the Boden catalogue and perhaps forego their skiing holiday, just this once.”

She makes a telling point.

Around such dinner tables this summer in West London, the need for government cuts is bound to have come up in the excited post-coalition chatter. One can easily imagine it being said by wealthy head-hunters, the occasional banker, super-affluent journalists and their friends (the new Cameroon ministers) that is is “outrageous that middle class people like us get child benefit.” And it’s surely possible to see the point, although it will be a good many years since most of those people last earned £44,000.But from such thinking sprung a policy that creates a sudden cut-off for those on £44K today, and which sends a message to the great many underneath that income level with aspirations for tomorrow.

By coincidence, the day that Parson’s piece appeared, the latest catalogue for the furniture company Oka landed on our doormat at home. It made me wonder about the electoral viability of what we might call Oka Conservatism.

Oka is a company with impeccable Cameroon connections, run by strong-willed entrepreneurial women. The PM’s mother-in-law Lady Astor was a founder.

In its shops you can find the expression of a particular kind of elegant West London and South West London late 30s and 40 something living – with lots of cream, tasteful lighting and the odd ethnic themed item thrown in. If Oka made food, all the ingredients would be organic and sourced from Hugh Fearnley-Whatshisname. The furniture is extraordinarily over-priced for what it is, but then what isn’t these days.

Of course, a typical customer at the store wouldn’t be so vulgar as to fill the entirety of their house with Oka furniture, lamps and rugs, just as they wouldn’t be seen dead in head to toe Boden (“just the odd polo shirt, and the children’s clothes are great”). No, Oka provides a basic but expensive backdrop against which more individual items from more exclusive stores (such as George “Osborne and Little”) can be displayed in smart West London homes.

Think of Oka as the IKEA of the Cameroon classes, although Cameron himself is always canny enough to point out that he himself sometimes buys and constructs IKEA furniture. As he did when he did up the nursery in Number 10 after the election, and got Nick Clegg to help. Message: we’re just a pair of ordinary dads struggling with a flat packed wardrobe. Response: Come off it. Their natural habitat is much more rarified and London upper-middle class than that.

Why does any of this matter? If David Cameron wants to govern in his own right after 2015, or even at the head of another coalition, he is going to need the votes of people a million miles removed from that world. If they calculate that he or his coterie are too remote form their concerns that is likely to have implications.

Ever since the post-war collapse of the culture of deference, leaders who are successful electorally have been adept at understanding the concerns of the broad middle – with a particular emphasis on the lower-middle classes. That includes Thatcher and Blair. She felt it instinctively, having started in Grantham. He realized he could not win without thinking his way into the heads of the voters he needed to convince.

Harold Macmillan, something of a hero of David Cameron’s, was actually rather brilliant at grasping this whole business. In D.R. Thorpe’s new biography a wonderful tale is included, of Macmillan’s grandson asking the old man whether he was annoyed by the increased number of airliners taking off near his country home and flying overhead. Not a bit of it, said Macmillan, it was a wonderful development. Those planes were full of hardworking people off to have foreign holidays and broadening their experiences as they rose on the tide of prosperity. When he said that Britons had never had it so good, he meant it (unlike Lord Young) in a positive, inclusive sense.

But all the evidence so far suggests that Cameron doesn’t connect properly with such voters. He didn’t mange to in the election, or he would have won. And the task won’t get easier. The longer he is Prime Minister the more shielded he will become; that is just the way it is.

In the end I suspect that Cameron’s model is actually more Baldwin, than it is Macmillan. Stanley Baldwin, like Cameron a creature of coalition, had a vision involving a supposed unifying of all the classes in combined national endeavor. It reminds me of the Tory pitch at their conference this year, when the Conservative slogan was: “Together in the National Interest”.

But beyond war, can a modern Prime Minister really be for “everyone”? Of course not. The Queen is supposed to be for “everyone”, she’s the head of state. Since the full extension of the franchise, PMs who have succeeded have tended to do so by indentifying themselves with the aspirations of those who do most of the work in Britain and have most of the votes. The broad middle, the people Cohen identified.

Ed Miliband says they are now the focus of his interest. Well let’s see if they want what he is proposing, if he can decide any time in the next few years exactly what that is.

But super-confident David Cameron storms on, determined not to be diverted from his interesting experiment in running for office and attempting to hold onto it without a direct appeal to key swing voters. Perhaps he has concluded they have nowhere else to go in 2015? Perhaps he’ll be vindicated. But if in time they get annoyed in sufficient numbers, or think the Prime Minister comes across as excessively entitled and don’t like it, he will have no reserve capital to draw on.

Oka Conservatism, by definition, will continue to have only niche appeal.

Comments (5 of 14)

Larry Bartels wrote an excellent article which touches on some of these issues. I particularly like it for the Homer Simpson cartoon on the front but also for the survey which reveals that 69% of Americans thought they may be affected by Bush's plan to cut inheritance tax (when in reality only 1-2% would be). People are very bad at judging where they fit in the income distribution.

I totally agree with the broader point, but I actually think this is unfair to Humphrys. He didn't express any incredulity at 26,000 being the middle; he was trying to press Milliband on how focusing on those above and beyond that level squared with the £44,000 cut-off for child benefit. The answer is, of course, as you point out, that in household income terms, those on £44,000 are very much in the 'squeezed middle' in some parts of the country. But Milliband completely failed to explain that clearly, which, given that it's his signature policy, is pretty worrying.

6:23 pm November 27, 2010

Walter Ellis wrote :

Now this is more like it, Iain. I will never agree with you on the Euro – or Europe generally. But when you turn your mind to the problems of real people in the real economy, you don't miss a beat. Keep at it.

Funny thing is that Red is a theoretical Socialist (communist) who will in act absurd economic policies just out of spite, 50p tax is a prime example. Still if you live in a theoretical construct of class war and the industrial revolution then hey presto. Ee by gum